Chapter One

      “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today—”

      The ceremony had been a dumb idea.

      “—Alana Gold Collins to rest. The Father tells us—”

      Hands together at his belt buckle, Flint Collins stared down past the crease in his black pants to the tips of his shiny black shoes. Alana Gold. Such a lofty name. Like a movie star or something.

      Alana Gold. Not much about his mother’s life had been golden. Except her hair, he supposed. Back when she’d been young and pretty. Before the hard life, the drugs and prison had had their way with her.

      “—all will be changed at the last sounding of the bell...”

      The Father might have imparted that message. The Bible surely did, according to the preacher he’d hired to give his mother a funeral. Dearly Beloved, he’d said. That would be Flint. The dearly beloved. All one of him.

      He’d never known any other family. Didn’t even know who his father was.

      Footsteps sounded behind him and he stiffened. He’d asked her to come—the caseworker he’d only met two days before. To do the...exchange.

      Dearly Beloved. In her own way Alana had loved Flint deeply. Just as, he was absolutely certain, she’d loved the “inheritance” she’d left him. One he hadn’t known about. One he hadn’t yet seen. One that had arrived behind him.

      “So take comfort...” That was the preacher again. For the life of him, Flint drew a blank on his name as he glanced up and met the older man’s compassionate gaze.

      He almost burst out with a humorless chuckle. Comfort? Was the man serious? Flint’s whole life had imploded in the space of a week. Would never, ever, be the same or be what he’d planned it to be. Comfort was a pipe dream at best.

      As the footsteps in the grass behind him slowed, as he felt the warmth of a body close to him, Flint stood still. Respectful.

      He’d lost his business before it had even opened. He’d lost the woman he’d expected to marry, to grow old beside.

      Alana Gold had lost her life.

      And in her death had taken part of his.

      The preacher spoke about angels of mercy. The woman half a step behind him rocked slightly, not announcing herself in any way other than her quiet presence. Flint fought to contain his grief. And his anger.

      His entire life he’d had to work longer, fight harder. At first to avoid getting beaten up. And then to make a place for himself in the various families with whom he’d been temporarily settled. He’d had a paper route at twelve and delivered weekly grocery ads to neighborhoods for pennies, just to keep food on the table during the times he’d been with Alana.

      The preacher spoke of heaven.

      Flint remembered when he’d been a junior in high school, studying for finals, and had had to spend the night before his test getting his mother out of jail. She’d been prostituting that time. Those were the charges. She’d claimed differently.

      But then, Alana’s troubles had always been someone else’s fault.

      In the beginning they probably had been. She’d once claimed that she’d gotten on the wrong track because she’d been looking for a way to escape an abusive father. That was the one part of her story Flint fully believed. He’d met the guy once. Had opted, when given the chance in court, to never have to see him again. Sometimes it worked in a guy’s favor to have a caseworker.

      After Alana’s prostitution arrest during his finals week, he’d expected to be seeing his caseworker again, to have her come to pick him up and take him back to foster care. Instead his mother had been sitting in the living room when he’d gotten home from school the next day, completely sober, her fingernails bitten to the quick, with a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies on her lap, worried sick that she’d made him fail his exam.

      Tears had dripped down her face as he’d told her of course not, he’d aced it. Because he’d skipped lunch to cram. She’d apologized. Again and again. She’d always said he was the only good thing about her. That he was going to grow up to be something great, for both of them. She’d waited on him hand and foot for a few weeks. Had stayed sober and made it to work at the hair salon—where she’d qualified for men’s basic cuts only—for most of that summer.

      Until one of her clients had talked her into going out for a good time...

      “Let us pray.”

      Flint’s head was already bowed. The brief ceremony was almost over. The closed casket holding his mother’s body would remain on the stand, waiting over the hole in the ground until after Flint was gone and the groundskeeper came to lower her to her final rest.

      Moisture pricked the backs of his eyelids. For a second, he started to panic like he had the first day he’d gone out to catch the bus for school—a puny five-year-old in a trailer park filled with older kids—and been shoved to the back of the line by every one of them. He could have turned and run home. No one would have stopped him. Alana hadn’t been sober enough to know, or care, whether he’d made it to his first day of school. But he hadn’t run. He’d faced that open bus door, climbed those steps that had seemed like mountains to him and walked halfway to the back of the bus before sitting.

      He was Alana Gold’s precious baby boy and he was going to be someone.

      “Amen.” The preacher laid a Bible on top of the coffin.

      Amen to that. He was Alana’s son and he was going to be someone all right.

      “Mr. Collins?”

      The voice, a woman’s voice, was close to him.

      “Mr. Collins? I’ve got her things in the car, as you asked.”

      Her things. Things for the inheritance Alana had left him. More scared than he could ever remember being, Flint raised his head and turned it to see the brunette standing behind him, a concerned look on her face. A pink bundle in her arms.

      Staring at that bundle, he swallowed the lump in his throat. He wasn’t prepared. No way could he pass this test. In her death, Alana had finally set him up for failure. She’d unintentionally done it in the past but had never succeeded. This